#35: "All Apologies" - Nirvana

One of the harder songs to write about because of the time, place, the impact of this songwriter but this remains my favorite Nirvana song for a reason.

“You can’t fire me because I quit” - Kurt Cobain from “Scentless Apprentice.”

I can’t explain how I knew something was wrong with Kurt, but I had this horrible feeling watching MTV’s Live and Loud on December 13, 1993, as it aired. There was this moment towards the end of the performance right after the band smashes their gear and equipment when Kurt starts clapping along with the audience with a strange look in his eyes. I immediately sensed he was mocking them for cheering and loving him. After mock-clapping, he storms off the stage with a despondent expression. It’s not a celebratory moment. Kurt might even be showing in that instance that he’s resentful of the crowd for enjoying the show. He was deeply unhappy and I sensed it right away. Something was off. My “hero” at the time was struggling with fame, marriage, addiction and so much more.

I have already written about the impact of musicians like Liz Phair and Matthew Sweet on my life, but Kurt Cobain was first. He was the reason I wanted to play guitar and form a band. I first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on a boombox outside the quad of my junior high school, where friends would congregate right after the 3:30 bell went off. I had never heard anything like it before and I asked my dad to take me to a local record store to purchase the cassette. Up until that point, my father and I enjoyed the same kind of music, but this was the first time he didn’t connect with that kind of anger and ferocity. He was a quiet, relaxed man with taste that reflected his personality. The loudest he ever got was playing Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. Nirvana’s overly distorted layered sound mixed with punky Cobain’s screaming turned him off. Nevertheless, it had an opposite effect on me. It tapped into the zeitgeist for a reason.

I really hadn’t listened to angry, aggressive rock music before Nirvana. I certainly listened to gangsta rap and hip-hop like Public Enemy but nothing along the lines of punk music. For a little while, I was friends freshman year with someone who gave me one of those eye-opening mixtapes that included things like The Damned, Misfits and The Buzzcocks because he was mad about the success of Nirvana and Green Day.

He thought they were posers and there was nothing punk about them. They were ruining his favorite genre and when I began wearing Nirvana and Green Day shirts to school, he not only stopped being friends with me, but he also verbally threatened me. This was a new experience to me as well: outright anger towards one’s taste in the fine arts. There was even my first taste of a rare moment of pure animosity towards an authority figure: a teacher.

My journalism teacher was someone I looked up to mainly because she was praising my writing at the time. After Kurt Cobain took his own life, I was assigned to write about it by her because I certainly didn’t hide my love for Nirvana. Plus I was in a band, wore lots of music t-shirts and hats - and the odd nerd out. After writing a poignant, honest piece about what Nirvana meant to me and my peers, it was subjected to major revision in a way that made it read like someone else had wrote it. My teacher said, “we can’t publish it as is because you glorify suicide and what he did.” I was furious. But as an adult now, who knows.

Maybe she was right, and I was just upset since it was the first time I was heavily edited. Strangely, it felt like it was mirroring what I had seen in high school films when the students would reject or confront teachers in power: I mainly just felt they were wrong, and I was right. Still, I do think I was being honest in saying that Nirvana and Kurt Cobain changed everything for the better at the time. I was not endorsing suicide but coming to terms with what he had done and tried to understand his mental state. He could no longer connect to others in the way that so many teenagers of my generation connected to the sound of his voice.

We were young, dumb and eager to connect to something. It was around this time that I had heard the soundtrack to the film Pump Up the Volume but sadly, was gaining a lot of weight due to a lack of exercise and fast-food consumption. I started feeling like an outcast that would never fit in due to awkwardness and low self-esteem. I went from listening to hip-hop with a few preppy jocks in 7th grade to transitioning towards the a/v and theater nerds that liked to wear all black and flannel shirts.

It was a sudden shift that took place in 8th grade right into freshman year. Nirvana and eventually Nine Inch Nails were responsible for a lot of good in my life at a time when I needed intense music that captured a feeling of discontentment and change. Plus, it was easy to find like-minded people by simply wearing a band’s t-shirt which contained the image from the album cover.

Nevermind certainly changed everything as most people know so no need to go on at length about its impact. In Utero remains an all-time favorite record of mine and a representation of why the band was groundbreaking and exceptional. The lyrics are stronger, more direct and metaphorically messier in the right ways. I wouldn’t be surprised if Kurt Cobain adopted the William Burroughs approach (they did collaborate at one point) of just random lines being strung together in hopes they’ll make sense later. “Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld / so I can sigh eternally,” was the first of many that stood out to me from “Pennyroyal Tea.” (Ties in beautifully to the fact that Cohen was used so prominently in the film that saved my life).

It got to the point where I was shamelessly quoting In Utero lyrics to jocks picking on me for being overweight and (God forbid) reading a book before class started. I remember being so mad at them for suddenly wearing the same shirts I owned - Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails. Q101 and MTV were to blame but it didn’t matter in a way. Yet all of those lead songwriters would be unthrilled to discover they have acquired heartless bullies as their new fans. They were writing songs for the outcasts, the freaks and geeks, the strange and unusual so they would feel less alone.

I felt less alone listening to In Utero for sure. It channeled my anger and frustration quite well but it was also hauntingly beautiful at times. Something about Kurt’s approach to the softer tracks was a blueprint for things to come. He had recently become a huge fan of R.E.M’s Automatic for the People and you could sense him wanted to move beyond grunge to an extent with songs like “Dumb” and “All Apologies.” The band memorably performed an episode of MTV’s Unplugged for a reason. Kurt was indeed leaning more towards becoming Neil Young instead of Johnny Rotten.

For these sessions, hiring Steve Albini was the right decision - the drum sound alone was distinctive and the whole record sounds nothing like Nevermind. This is more raw, noisy, nasty and unhinged at times. One could scoff at a track like “Tourette’s” as a throwaway but it’s a 90-second barrage of fire and fury. A louder contrast for what’s to come with the album closer - showcasing both sides of the band and what they can achieve in the studio. “All Apologies” feels like a swan song but it manages to keep Kurt’s essence alive whenever you put it on again.

There’s that line “aqua seafoam shame”, which could be interpreted in a number of ways. It could just be an instance of absurdist wordplay – Cobain, though sometimes viewed as a weak lyricist, had a penchant for abstract, sometimes meaningless poetry that somehow became meaningful due to the his delivery. Alternatively, it could be a reference to finding solace in silence and solitude, especially alongside the line “find my nest of salt.”

Finally, it could allude to the feelings of self-loathing Cobain was experiencing following the success of Nevermind, given the symbolism of the album’s iconic cover. Though this kind of lyrical dissection in essay-form is exactly what Cobain would have despised, there’s no denying that there’s at least some significance to the motif of underwater imagery recurring throughout Nirvana’s work.

“All Apologies” still makes me very emotional when I go back to it, because it does sound like Kurt Cobain is apologizing for taking his own life. Granted, he didn’t know it at the time - he’s mostly coming to terms with being unhappy even though he’s found love and “marriage,” while “everyone is gay.” I listened to both the remastered version but I greatly prefer Alibi’s original mix from 1993. The cello is more in the background, Kurt’s vocals have the right amount of reverb - especially when the guitars get a little loud after his trademark snarl screams out “married, buried.”

I still don’t know what “aqua seaform shame” truly means, but it flows beautifully in the context of feeling out of touch and disappointed with life and/or success. As much as I love everything about the song, it really comes to life with Grohl’s fills after the second verse around the 2-minute mark and Kurt simply sings “yeah yeah yeah.”

It holds on the same chord and riff for the final 90 seconds while Kurt harmonizes with himself singing, “all in all is all we are” while the cello screeches and the fuzz guitar begins to feedback. The cello bow can be heard hitting the strings. Kurt’s final line sung even goes off center as if he’s too tired and is ready to quit. In a way, I feel like he wore himself out. He had health issues that caused him to self-medicate with heroin and more than likely, nobody ever said ‘no’ to him when he asked for drugs, as harmful as they were. In the sun, Kurt felt as one. Could the warmth of the sun equate to the glow and temperature-rise one could get for putting a painkiller into their veins? Perhaps he was also just reflecting on how we are all one - in pain, in pleasure, healing, happy, depressed, dying. We all may end up married (or in love) but we’re also all going to end up buried (or cremated).

“As I listened to In Utero, I was struck at how the album version of “All Apologies” felt like a very different song. In the Unplugged version, all I heard was an unanswerable whine. The studio version, so full of sonic layers and ambience, gave my ears other places to go. The verses build up and then the chorus explodes. Listening to that version, “All Apologies” sounds less like a suicide note and more like a piece of 90’s zeitgeist. In Utero was released the same year as Beck’s “Loser” and just one year after Radiohead’s “Creep.” It was a badge of honor to hate yourself in a lot of 90’s music, and certainly not all those artists were forecasting their own suicides. While the Unplugged performance of “All Apologies” was often used to showcase Cobain’s hopelessness, the album version shows there’s more to the song. In Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, Cobain described the song to Michael Azerrad as “pure happy happiness.” He said he had dedicated the song to his wife, Courtney Love, and his daughter, Frances Bean Cobain. He commented that the lyrics don’t match the sentiment he has for them, but the feeling behind them does. Over and over, Cobain’s own remarks about songwriting attest that he’d jot down lyrics in the last few minutes before recording. His music was never about making sense of the literal lyrics, and it’s a mistake to seek understanding through one performance of one song.” - Erin Lyndal Martin

Kurt himself viewed it as a happy-sounding song but the words remain pitch black sad. It does feel like an ideal closing track regardless of the intent. Personally, I can’t help but think of it as a melancholic number only due to what became of Kurt. Some people have written that he is actually singing at the end, “all alone is all we are" especially in the MTV Unplugged version which takes something reasonably positive into something negative unless you frame “aloneness” as a needed state of being. (I will often go on record as saying ‘boredom’ and ‘alone’ are not inherently bad).

Maybe after all the rock shows, media interviews and adoring fans, Kurt truly needed to be completely alone as beautifully captured in Gus Van Sant’s fascinating film Last Days. I actually felt a little angry the first time I saw Van Sant’s interpretation of the final events leading up to Kurt’s suicide but a second viewing cleared things up tremendously to where I learned to separate “expectations” vs. “execution.” It’s a film I may or may not write about later but let’s just say I think it’s one of Van Sant’s best - a film that Kurt himself might have appreciated if he was still with us.

It’s hard to summarize everything that Kurt Cobain meant to me at an age when I needed to hear his music. Similiarly to Pump Up The Volume, I almost felt like certain bands or films were written to help me when I had no idea what depression and anxiety even were, in a clinical sense. It really wasn’t until my parents took me to a doctor in 1998 (two years after high school) at the University of Chicago that actually uttered the words, “consider Prozac.”

Which made my parents a bit angry to some degree because I was going to see him to uncover the reasons behind my constant migraines - they were happening on a daily basis whereas now, they usually occur weekly, and I treat them like a regular headache that I do my best to endure. It’s just wild to think that I was severely depressed and never thought to get help or seek treatment. So instead, I turned to the arts and eventually, my own guitar. I may not have done that if it weren’t for Nirvana. That’s true for so many of my generation who would all go on to develop a passion and appreciation for all kinds of music, not just “grunge.”

Kurt loved music too but nothing could save him from his pain. It does feel like he intended “All Apologies” as a swan song; asking for forgiveness whether it’s warranted or not, likely directed at his wife and child instead of the fans. Lots of music affected me deeply around this time. Hearing songs like “Today” by Smashing Pumpkins or “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails might have been even better than medication or a therapist. I only wish Kurt could’ve found hope and help in ways that existed outside of drugs and rock & roll.

He should’ve been able to get clean like Jeff Tweedy did after his own bout with prescription painkiller addiction (strangely enough, he too had suffered from recurring migraines). But we all know what happened one year after In Utero was put out into the world. I always choose to frame it this way: the day we all found out Kurt Cobain died was the day I made two of my closest friends because we were all in shock and decided to spend the day together, listening to Nirvana and finding comfort in each other’s company and passion for what he gave us all. If you truly want to see the best performance and rendition of my favorite Nirvana song, click below. Let’s remember him through his music and be grateful he inspired so many future musicians like myself. Give me a Kurt Cobain afterworld so I can sigh eternally.